MWD STAFF LIVES HIGH ON PUBLIC’S DIME

The giant Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, which supplies water to member agencies serving 19 million people from Ventura to Riverside to San Diego, raised the basic rate it charges its customers by 75 percent from 2006 to 2012 and has 5 percent raises scheduled this year and again in 2014. This staggering short-term run-up in water bills is always characterized as unavoidable because of short supplies.

But as a new report by the Orange County Register makes clear, at least part of those rate hikes are necessary for reasons that have nothing to do with short supplies. The piece laid out how MWD has an estimated $545 million in unfunded liabilities because of absurdly and unnecessarily generous lifetime medical benefits it has promised its workers. Until last year, the benefit vested after just five years on the job. Now newly hired MWD workers have to put 20 years in for the full lifetime benefit, receiving a half benefit after 10 years of work.

This is a fresh reminder that the MWD resembles a self-serving, self-enriching cabal of monopolists much more than a government agency devoted to the public interest. Instead of doing all it could to cut costs, MWD has a history of seeking to shift as much revenue as it can to its executives and rank-and-file workers, now and in retirement.

If you think that’s an exaggeration, let’s consider anew the appalling events of summer and fall 2009. That’s when MWD tried to quietly approve a preposterous contract granting a permanent, retroactive 25 percent pension increase to all of the agency’s nearly 2,000 employees, adding $60 million-plus in new unfunded liabilities to the agency’s existing $400 million pension shortfall. The contract also would have provided a five-year raise of up to 23 percent.

The usual fig-leaf claim was made that the pension giveaway was needed to keep valuable employees from leaving. But if the giveaway had passed, 55 MWD executives could have immediately retired with an annual pension that was $20,000 or more higher than it was the day before. Instead of seeking to keep workers, MWD upper management tried to sneak through a huge pension boost that would have allowed dozens of high-paid managers to quit and enjoy decades of leisurely retirement.

This wasn’t the usual pension scam, in which unions elect pliant City Councils or school boards and then collect their rewards. On this scam, the management and the unions were in cahoots. This was MWD management seeking to reward itself and the agency’s rank-and-file employees while sending the bill to 19 million Southern Californians.

But that’s the MWD. Even as water rates go up, up and away, the agency has no one on the inside advocating for low costs to help ratepayers. In describing this state of affairs, many adjectives come to mind. Scant few are printable.